The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls. Establishing a beachhead on enemy-held turf is historically one of the most dangerous jobs in warfare, just ask Achilles. But the robotic age may make it slightly less so. A research team from Stamford, Conn. has developed an amphibious drone that they are currently testing with the Marines. The GuardBot is a robot ball that swims over water at about 4 miles per hour and then rolls along the beach, at as much as a 30-degree incline and 20 miles per hour. It uses a nine-axis stabilization, “pendulum motion” propulsion system, which moves the bot forward by shifting the center of gravity back and forth and a variety of steering algorithms. It took creator Peter Muhlrad some seven years to develop, but now that it’s complete Muhlrad says it can be rapidly produced in various sizes.
Company documents suggest it can be scaled down to units as small as 10 cm and as large as nine feet. Muhlrad’s company, GuardBot Inc. has a cooperative research development agreement, or CRADA, with the Navy. The British Navy Bought Artificial Intelligence to Make Its Sailors Better Shots. Deep Vision Deep Vision’s system, called Dynamic Fall-of-Shot Feedback (DFOSF), is designed to be implemented on navy ships.
Computer vision algorithms track where rapidly fired bullets hit the water in relation to a designated target. The system tracks both small arms fire and the intended recipient, and provides live feedback to the gunner about how accurate their shots are. For now, the system is being developed as a training tool for the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy using funding from the Center for Defence Enterprise (CDE). Small arms fire at sea is relatively common, but traditional training exercises require physical retrieval of a dummy target to gauge how well the sailors-in-training did.
But Deep Vision believes DFOSF could make training more efficient, and the system has been used on pre-recorded footage of live fire training exercises to demonstrate. much less a computer program “You can think of it like each object type having its own word in a language that the machine. Eating the Sun: Can Humans Be Hacked to Do Photosynthesis? Soylent But humans and plants haven’t shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years.
Nearly everything about our biology is fundamentally different. So it would seem like there’s no way we could actually engineer ourselves to do photosynthesis—or is there? New research Elysia chlorotica, the animal that’s sort of a plant. Image: Patrick Krug Woods Hole’s Marine Biological Laboratory reported last week that scientists have unlocked the secret behind Elysia chlorotica, the brilliant green sea slug that looks like a leaf, eats sunlight like a leaf, but is, in fact, an animal. “There is no way on Earth that genes from an algae should work inside an animal cell,” study co-author Sidney K. When it comes to tapping the sun’s energy, humans have spent a billion years moving in the wrong evolutionary direction. When you get down to biology’s smallest scales—our cells and our genetic code—it turns out, we’re not so very different.
Now Pierce and his co-authors have an explanation. Shh, the TV's Listening: Voice Is the New Privacy Frontline. That shouldn't come as a surprise: One of the key features of such televisions is their voice recognition, so the fact it's listening and analysing your speech to save you typing is part of the appeal. However, sharp-eyed readers of Samsung's privacy policy noted this line: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition.”
Unsurprisingly, critics trotted out the usual “Orwellian” accusations, but in this case the comparison isn't far off. As Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins tweeted, the idea sounds nicked straight from 1984: Left: Samsung SmartTV privacy policy, warning users not to discuss personal info in front of their TV Right: 1984 pic.twitter.com/osywjYKV3W— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 8, 2015 company sayingbelieved to be And all that data piling up about you is inevitably a target for hackers. This Is Why the Navy Can't Have Nice Railguns. in concept and prototype for years now At the Naval Future Force Science and Technology Expo, Vice Adm. William Hilarides explained that three problems with the railgun remain: room on ships, integrating the new weapons with the old weapons systems, and power—as in, not enough of it.
The railgun doesn’t rely on chemical explosions like more conventional weapons. Instead, the projectile is housed in a electrically conductive metal armature, which connects two parallel, 30-foot rails. A huge 25-megawatt electric pulse is sent down the rails, creating the magnetic fields that shoot the armature and projectile out. For the Navy, the upsides to an electromagnetic railgun are clear: its range of 100 miles is about double that of conventional high-velocity projectiles, and its projectiles, which go seven times the speed of sound, aren't explosive.
It takes a significant amount of power to fire something that far and fast, however. It's hard to conceptualize 25 megawatts, for me anyway. America's Fish Are Getting High on Your Pee Supply. Fish know all about your grimy excretions. They have to live with what you flush down the toilet every day, after all. And the unluckiest ones have an even closer relationship with you, depending on what medicines you take, where you are, and what part of the year it is.
Our understanding of pharmaceutical pollution begins nearly 20 years ago, when ecologist JP Sumpter discovered something surprising: unusually high numbers of feminized fish—egg-producing males with ovaries—were swimming in English rivers. When Sumpter and colleagues tested the water, they found something even stranger: estrogen from human birth control pills. It was one of the first signs that pharmaceuticals flushed down the drain could build up in lakes and rivers to levels high enough to affect fish. “Between 2002 and now, there’s been more than a thousand publications on the topic,” said Heiko Schoenfuss, an aquatic toxicologist at St. An osprey takes off with still-flopping catch. Here’s What You’ll Find on the Fighter Jet of 2030. Quatro compras com o cartão bastam para identificar qualquer pessoa - Reproduzido do El País, 30/1/2015; intertítulos do OI. Quatro gestos tão corriqueiros como pagar o bilhete de metrô, a comida do almoço, um par de tênis em uma loja de material esportivo ou as entradas do cinema permitem identificar quase qualquer pessoa.
Embora não se saiba o nome ou o número da conta, um estudo com dados de compras de 1,1 milhão de pessoas revela a identidade em mais de 90% dos casos. É o poder dos metadados e do big data. Quando estourou o caso Snowden nos Estados Unidos, aconteceu um grande escândalo com um dos programas de espionagem da NSA que compilava milhões de ligações telefônicas. As autoridades norte-americanas esclareceram em seguida que não espionavam o conteúdo das conversas em si, a não ser metadados como quem ligava para quem, a que horas ou durante quanto tempo. O Google e o Facebook também os usam para melhorar seus serviços ou oferecer publicidade mais personalizada. Em princípio, a reunião desse tipo de dados de forma anônima em grandes bases não seria uma grande ameaça à privacidade das pessoas. The Dark Age of Virtual Reality-Based Torture Is Approaching Fast.
It sounds like a computer model of the exact opposite of Fung Shui, but it’s quite real. Built by anarchists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, the so-called psychotechnic torture cell used turn-of-the-century perceptual concepts in abstract art to maximize sensory disruption, subverting prisoners’ senses to drive them mad. It’s a bizarre example of the kind of mind-fuckery that’s possible when someone has the means of shaping your reality—something modern technology now allows us to do like never before. Virtual reality is being trumpeted as a platform for everything from pornography to video games to treating PTSD.
But given how powerful VR is becoming, and how widely used it’s evidently going to become, one logical misuse is especially disturbing: torture. To be clear, there’s no evidence of VR being used to press people for information the way sound, rectal feeding, and other horrors were applied by the CIA in its secret prisons. Image: SoundSelf. Global Cyber Defense Demand Will Exceed Capability for Years To Come. If Obama Gets His Way, Sharing This Story Will Soon Be a Felony. On Jan. 20, this website published a story titled, "If This Is Your Password, Change It Immediately. " The article included a list of the 25 personal passwords — "password" and "abc123" among them — most commonly found in databases of personal account information routinely leaked by hackers. The material came from SplashData, an internet security firm that seeks out vulnerable targets and reports on them to an often endangered public.
The list of passwords appeared in various forms on outlets including CBS News, NPR and the BBC, to name a few. Later that night, President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address made the case for a new proposal to rewrite and tighten federal cybersecurity laws, so that no "foreign nation" or "hacker" would have the ability to "shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families. Especially our kids. " But the broad laws he proposed would not simply target shadowy foreign hackers.
Does that sound insane? What Your Facebook Posts Mean to US Special Operations Forces. Our Overreaction to Terrorist Attacks Like Paris Is Only Making Things Worse. Editors Note: “Rethinking Intelligence” is a project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law that examines the contemporary U.S. intelligence community, which fellow Michael German argues “has grown too large, too expensive, too powerful, too ineffective, and too unaccountable to the American people.”
In this occasional series, Defense One presents a selection of commentaries and interviews conducted by the Brennan Center with officials from defense, homeland security, federal law enforcement, Congress, intelligence, and other groups who present their ideas to improve the business of American intelligence. Their arguments tackle three fundamental questions: what is the scope of the new intelligence community, why does it sometimes fail, and how should the US reform it?
For more, visit the Brennan Center online. Anyone following the events in Europe as they unfolded would have seen familiar tropes playing out in the media. Tor and Encryption Have Created a ‘Zone of Lawlessness,’ Justice Department Says. Leslie Caldwell, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said that the department is “very concerned” by the Google’s and Apple’s decision to automatically encrypt all data on Android and iOS devices. Her comments aren’t entirely surprising, considering that FBI Director James Comey previously said that the agency would push Congress to make automatic encryption illegal, and President Obama has also expressed concern with the development. The problem that privacy and security advocates have pointed out is that the US government doesn’t really seem to understand what it’s asking for. Caldwell was being interviewed as a part of the annual State of the Net Conference in Washington, DC. One minute, she was vilifying encryption; the next, she was sending a message to the country’s citizens and companies that they need to be “more conscious of cybersecurity.”
“They need to be assuming they are vulnerable, assuming their data can be taken,” she said. Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But recently, researchers have begin to question his conclusions—and offer some of their own. In 1961, Yale University psychology professor Stanley Milgram placed an advertisement in the New Haven Register.
“We will pay you $4 for one hour of your time,” it read, asking for “500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning.” Only part of that was true. Over the next two years, hundreds of people showed up at Milgram’s lab for a learning and memory study that quickly turned into something else entirely. Until they emerged from the lab, the participants didn’t know that the shocks weren’t real, that the cries of pain were pre-recorded, and that the learner—railroad auditor Jim McDonough—was in on the whole thing, sitting alive and unharmed in the next room.
The problem is, no one can really agree on what it proves instead. How big banks turned prisons into profit centers. Greg Cavaluzzi spent four years in federal prison, eating cold oatmeal and white bread for breakfast and bologna for lunch and dinner. So the first thing he wanted to do when he was released was to eat "something normal. " When his parents picked him up from Fort Dix in New Jersey, he took them to Wendy's.
"We didn't really talk," he says. "We ate. We were just so happy to be next to each other. " He ordered two bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, and paid for the meal with a JP Morgan Chase debit card featuring a photo of him in his prison-issued khakis, a backdrop measuring his height in the background. Cavaluzzi's meal cost around ten dollars. Cavaluzzi made that money as a librarian in prison, where wages start at $.11 an hour. "It just seemed a little... " The fees on prison-issued debit cards were agreed to in a contract with a branch of the Department of the Treasury in 2011, who provided the below schedule of fees. A New Book Claims the Internet Has Bred a Different Type of Capitalism. “So I asked if I could join,” said Andrew Keen.
“And they start mumbling and looking at their feet. They say you have to be invited.” In his new book The Internet is not the Answer, Keen rubs up against the “You’ve got wealthy Oakland residents crowd-funding their own militias,” he told me in a phone interview. “Google have superimposed Google Bus on San Francisco’s public transit system. These companies are eating away at the idea of public society.” The so-called Google bus is the private shuttle service that recently sparked protests as a symbol of gentrification and over the way it used public stops. A British-born writer and a prominent critic of the web since his 2008 best-seller The Cult of the Amateur, Keen occupies an unusual position in the Valley. “There’s this belief that the internet’s the answer to everything,” he explained, citing venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar’s call to “Uberize the government.”
These are radical ideas—of very rich people. Estados policiais à moda do “Ocidente” [Este é o blog do site Outras Palavras em CartaCapital. Aqui você vê o site completo] O serviço secreto da Grã-Bretanha adquiriu poderes para interceptar, a partir de cabos de fibra ótica, as comunicações mantidas, via internet, por cidadãos de qualquer nacionalidade. Esta invasão é praticada sem autorização judicial, e resulta na captura e armazenamento de um enorme volume de informações. Jornalistas de algumas das publicações mais conhecidas do mundo estiveram entre os alvos. Estes profissionais – em especial os repórteres investigativos – “representam uma ameaça potencial à segurança”, segundo documentos de circulação reservada.
Este conjunto de revelações amedrontadoras foi feito nos últimos dias pelo diário londrino The Guardian, com base em documentos vazados por Edward Snowden, ex-agente da CIA hoje perseguido pelos Estados Unidos e refugiado em Moscou. Como é comum nestes casos, o GCHQ não precisou obter autorização judicial. Teria sido um mero exercício técnico? So Far, 2015 Is Pure Dystopia. The US Military Is Building Gangs of Autonomous Flying War Bots. How the CIA made Google. The Decision That Threatens Democracy by Ronald Dworkin. The Supreme Court’s Billion-Dollar Mistake by David Cole. New police radars can 'see' inside homes. Psychologists can give you false memories of having committed a crime. - Seriously, Science? Why I Hope Congress Never Watches Blackhat. Sex, androids and violence in Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Patriot Act Idea Rises in France, and Is Ridiculed - NYTimes.com. New Air Force Bomber Is a Critical Piece of the Pentagon’s Pacific Weaponry.
The Billboards of the Future Are 'Trixelated' 3D Holograms. The Billboards of the Future Are 'Trixelated' 3D Holograms. The Hottest 'Hottest Year Ever' Ever. David Cameron: I'm off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto – report. Prominent Scientists Sign Letter of Warning About AI Risks The Psychology Of Fear: How Tough Mudder Designs Obstacles To Torture You. Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug or a Feature? This Robotics Designer Has a Plan for Sex to Go Social - Nerve. Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients. Artificial Intelligence Might Not Kill Us After All. Climate Change Will Fuel the World's Longest-Burning Fires. The EU Says Protecting Free Speech Means Deleting Things from the Internet. Nazis tried to train dogs to talk, read and spell to win WW2. Online Dating Is Turning Us All Into Tamagotchis. An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology - By Amber Case.
Were 11 Spanish Anarchists Arrested for Using Secure Email? Planet Hackers. The Search for Starivores, Intelligent Life that Could Eat the Sun. This DNA Printing Outfit Is Basically Promising an IRL Version of 'Bioshock' Carbon Colonialism: How the Fight Against Climate Change Is Displacing Africans. Roko's basilisk. Where Design Choices and Civil Rights Overlap. America's $28 Billion Failure in Pakistan. The Military’s New Year’s Resolution for Artificial Intelligence. How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm. Hybrid Land Vehicles Are the Future of Special Forces Operations. The Military Wants Smarter Insect Spy Drones. Forget the Sony Hack, This Could Be the Biggest Cyber Attack of 2015.
Sony leaks reveal Hollywood is trying to break DNS, the backbone of the internet. The New Sound of Crowd Control. Para além da invasão à rádio Itatiaia. Por que a internet nos tornou hipócritas - Reproduzido da CartaCapital, 8/12/2014. The First Novel Based on the CIA Torture Report Was Written by an Algorithm.
Coburn Has Gone Too Far Blocking Veterans Suicide Bill. The US Needs a New Church Committee. Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT. Teenage Riot. Pesticide-Fueled Toxic Slugs Are a Nightmare for Farmers. The Fracking Future Is a Big Myth. Page. Why has human progress ground to a halt? – Michael Hanlon. Atomic Skies: Learning from the Storm. What Happens When Spies Can Eavesdrop on Any Conversation? How the Pentagon’s Skynet Would Automate War.
How to Stop the Next Ebola: Call in the Veterinarians. Our Savior, The Supervillain. DeepMind Technologies. ELON MUSK: You Have No Idea How Close We Are To Killer Robots. Robot Apocalypse. White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering. Harvard Scientists Say It's Time to Think About Engineering the Climate. Firestone and the Warlord. NATO Is Sharpening Its Cyber War Defenses. Political Dysfunction Is a Worse Threat Than Putin, Say National Security Workers.
Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists. Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell. Blackout increase. The Pentagon’s New Offset Strategy Includes Robots. Putin’s latest gas deal highlights yet again that China is in the driver’s seat - Quartz. Predictors of ’29 Crash See 65% Chance of 2015 Recession. Pregnant, and No Civil Rights. The Internet's Invisible Sin-Eaters. The Dark Side Of America's Redneck Reality TV Obsession. Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness (Peter Sandman/Jody Lanard column)
Ebola-- Failures of Imagination (Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman article) The Grim Future if Ebola Goes Global. Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset – Research. The Man Who Fought the Synanon Cult and Won. Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire. How Russia Is Revolutionizing Information Warfare. The Biggest Tax Scam Ever.